Why Augustine’s Passionate Quest to Know Himself and Praise God Still Matters

In the year 397, a Catholic bishop named Aurelius Augustinus, living in the provincial Mediterranean seaport of Hippo Regius (now Annaba, Algeria), managed to compose, over the course of a year filled with exhausting pastoral duties, a strange work he gave the title “my confessions in thirteen books.” This is the intensely personal document we now think of as the West’s first autobiography.

Augustine was 43 at the time of its composition, a baptized Catholic for 10 years, a bishop for two. He was in bad shape--sick with a recurring inflammation and disheartened by schismatic attacks on his ecclesiastic authority and by politically motivated rumors about his sensational past. Against his own desire to lead a contemplative life, he had served as pastor to the Catholics of Hippo since 391, when he had been pressed into service as their priest. He wept through the whole ordination ceremony.

No wonder. His ordination pulled him back into the world’s fray. As an exultant convert in 387, Augustine imagined a genteel life of intellectual pursuits surrounded by like-minded friends in a serene monastic setting, first in the glorious region near Lake Como, later in his North African homeland. Instead, he had been forced into the duties of the priesthood by a fractious congregation and finally was called on to serve as its bishop in 395.

With his baptism, Augustine had turned his back on the fast-track career and public ambitions that had driven him as a young man who was, as he says in Book VI, “hankering after honors, wealth, and marriage.” The leisurely life he had in mind after his baptism was an honorable one in the Roman world, where the notion of a job was degraded to drudgery by its association with slavery. A life of gracious ease--the Latin otium cum dignitate--was the classical ideal for the truly civilized man.

In Augustine’s Roman North Africa, a bishop was no such gentleman of leisure. He was an ecclesiastical and liturgical figure but also a kind of magistrate, assaulted by his congregation with small claims disputes and forced to beseech a haughty civil service on their behalf. Until well after midday, Augustine might listen to the feuds and disgruntlements of his flock. He could waste the better part of his day hanging around the corridors of power, waiting to plead a case with a disdainful bureaucrat. It was public advocacy work, demanding, fitful, always presenting itself as urgent but opposed to the intellectual and spiritual life he craved.

Augustine was a writer, after all, a rhetorician by training. The frets and feuds of other people and the endless middle management of his bishopric nibbled his day away. He complained, as writers always do, of not having time to write or even to read. In a letter to a friend, he described himself as “a man who writes as he progresses and who progresses as he writes.” Not to write was not to think, really not to live.

Against this backdrop of the inexorable and, no doubt to him, alarmingly public spiral of his life, Augustine stops in his tracks (or pauses--perhaps the more accurate word) to write his urgent inquiry to his God. “The Confessions” is, among other things, the desperate gesture of a writer blocked from his work, seeking again the intimate embrace and healing intelligence of language.

In Milan on the solemn Easter Sunday night of April 24-25, in the year 387, according to the ritual all Catholic catechumens underwent, Augustine stepped alone, stark naked, into the pool of the basilica’s baptistery, and emerged from the waters to be clothed in a white robe, knowing himself utterly changed. This moment after his slow conversion to Catholicism, following years of frantic religious searching, remained an unequivocal treasure to him for the rest of his long life. Yet “The Confessions” is not a testament of triumphal conversion. It is a solemn act of renewal. We can recognize in Augustine’s book the later impulse of Dante’s midlife declaration when, “in the middle of the journey of our life,” as he says in the famous first lines of “The Divine Comedy,” “I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

This location--the adult midpoint of uncertainty and even anguish--is the site of autobiography. Augustine does not write his life as an act of reminiscence. Nor is memory his tool for a magisterial summing-up. Memory is, first, a captivating mystery. It is a faculty of mind so grand that Augustine turns to the heroic images of architecture to describe it: the “vast mansions of memory,” “the immense court of my memory.” But even mansions and palaces, those classical models for the storehouse of recollection, are not extensive enough to suggest his memory: “for there sky and earth and sea are readily available. . . .”

In Book X, Augustine’s majestic meditation on memory, he sees his own memory as an “exceedingly great, a vast, infinite recess” or, as another translation has it, “a spreading limitless room within me.” Memory is the only sure road to self-knowledge and therefore provides access to the Divine, which is Augustine’s real destination. This is so because “in the immense court of my memory . . . I come to meet myself.” Given such towering belief in the powers of memory, writing autobiography begins to look inevitable, even necessary. For autobiography is memory’s articulation. The confessio is the voice of memory, murmuring from its mysterious cavern.

There had been autobiographical accounts, Christian and pagan, before Augustine’s. The Catholic Church, since 310 the orthodox religion of the Roman Empire, was less than a century away from outlaw status. The harrowing sang-froid testimonials written at the edge of martyrdom by the early saints were a traditional genre for pious Christians. Lacking the drama of these martyrs, refined late-Roman Christians could still be edified by the inner struggles of good and evil in the formula conversion tales of their contemporaries. The fact that Christianity, unlike either Judaism or the religions of the Greeks and Romans, was a cult founded on the narrative of a single life--that of Jesus of Nazareth--may help to explain the appeal of the life stories in Christian literary culture and continuing into our own. Even further back, the pagan West had honored the notion of the self as the pathway of spiritual ascent. “Know yourself,” the doorway to the oracle at Delphi counseled. Knowing yourself has always been, for the West, just a short step away from writing yourself.

Still, Augustine’s autobiography struck even his contemporaries as new, startling even. It shocked them for reasons different from the way we might be shocked, perhaps, but it is still possible to feel their amazement. (Part of our shock is simply that someone writing 16 centuries ago can seem so much like us.) Here was a book, most likely written by hand in private but intended to be read aloud by small groups of educated Christians (and open-minded erudite pagans), a book handed around in a kind of samizdat circulation. It was greeted by the intense, if rarefied, buzz we might recognize from a coffeehouse poetry reading where aficionados know an original voice when they hear one.

Some of his first readers had theological and even stylistic criticisms of Augustine’s shattering book: It was too mystical; it was too flashy. But certainly one of the things that made Augustine’s readers gasp was not his admission of lust but his acknowledgment that, after conversion, indeed even as a bishop of the church, he is still searching and speculating about his God and himself. “These writings are not true confessions of mine,” he admits to God (and to his readers) about his grasp of scripture, “unless I confess to you, ‘I do not know.’ ” Augustine is not the mysteriously serene convert but an anxious soul, more inflamed than ever.

Theology aside, what may separate us most from Augustine is the way we read. A modern emblem of lonely individuality is the image of the urban commuter, head bent to open book, reading silently on a jammed subway. Our assumption that reading is an inner, essentially solitudinous activity would strike an ancient as eccentric. There was no publishing as we know it, of course, in Augustine’s world. Communal reading or recitation of books was so much a given of literate life that it went unremarked. When, however, Augustine first glimpses his mentor Ambrose, bishop of Milan, reading alone, silently to himself, he describes the act in Book VI of “The Confessions” like a fascinated anthropologist writing a field note on an exotic tribal custom: “[H]is eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.”

This observed moment was not simply an oddity for Augustine; it unlocked for him a new way of imagining a relationship with the Word. “The Confessions” is startling--to his ancient audience as well as to us--largely because Augustine has found a way to reveal the profound intimacy of a mind thinking. This is the narrative engine that drives autobiography: Consciousness, not experience, is the galvanizing core of a personal story.

Augustine does not present us with the result of thought in a bundled package; he confronts us with the passionate nature of the pursuit of meaning as it courses through a life. He reveals the urgency of the soul’s quest. Thinking and feeling merge in a way quite shocking--and thrilling. Augustine observed Ambrose deep in the meditation of scripture, and in “The Confessions” we observe Augustine in profound contemplation of his life. He saw the nakedness of Ambrose’s mental search when he caught him reading silently in the Milan cathedral. In the book of his life, Augustine makes of himself that searching figure, alone but companioned by his own questing mind, objectified by the act of writing. “I have become an enigma to myself,” he says, “and herein lies my sickness.” Saying this, he becomes the West’s first existential hero, both protagonist and narrator of his own inner struggle.

Literate ancients lived somewhere between a communal oral tradition and our own book culture. Books are objects to us, things we buy, borrow, carry around. But for men like Augustine, books, while they were formally composed texts rather than oral folklore, were not wholly material. To own a book in Augustine’s time might mean to memorize it, not to possess a copy of it. The ancients were monsters of memorization, committing whole treatises and much of scripture to memory in ways unfathomable to us. They performed this discipline for the most practical reason: The mind was the surest, cheapest way to maintain a library.

“To read” meant to listen. Public recitation made reading a kind of team sport. The audience might interrupt the reader to pose questions, to make comments, to pursue the subject of the document, spinning away and back again to the text itself. When Augustine considers the conundrum of Ambrose’s silent reading, for example, he finally puzzles out a likely reason for it: The old bishop “might be apprehensive that if he read aloud, and any closely attentive listener were doubtful on any point, or the author he was reading used any obscure expressions, he would have to stop and explain various difficult problems. . . .”

The culture of memorization affected composition as well. The treasury of memorized texts packed in the writer’s mind made “writing,” like “reading,” more densely communal than we can easily understand. A text was a buzz and murmur of voices: literary chamber music, not solo performance. The call and reply between a writer’s own voice and his memorized texts created a rich, polyphonic texture, an antiphony of language in which leitmotifs of prized quotations suddenly wink and gleam from new prose settings.

Augustine doesn’t just “quote” the Psalms in “The Confessions”; they penetrate his text like a theme he can improvise endlessly, proving their protean nature and his own virtuoso intimacy with them. He truly has the Psalms “by heart.” He tunes his lyre to David’s and makes his own spiritual music from monotheism’s primal songs and laments.

The first nine books of “The Confessions” feel familiar to us. They are what we think of as autobiography. Augustine casts before us incident and vignette, sketch and portrait, stringing these bright gemstones on the story line of his life as he writes his way from his birth in 354 in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras in the hills of eastern Algeria) to the bittersweet period following his baptism when his mother dies at the Roman port of Ostia as she and Augustine and their circle wait to sail home to Africa.

In these nine chapters of his life, Augustine muses about his boyhood and even beyond that to his time in the womb, searching what a psychologized modern would call “the unconscious” for hints and clues to his nature. He is clearly troubled by the mystery of existence: “I do not know where I came from,” he says with surprisingly agnostic wonder.

Augustine begins his great portrait of his devout Berber Christian mother in Book I as he reminds the Lord how he nursed at her breast, taking in, he knows, much more than milk. Monica’s personality storms and rainbows over the entire book. She is her son’s biggest fan and greatest nag. She is also “my mother, my incomparable mother!” Her concern about her son verges on obsession. “Like all mothers, though far more than most,” Augustine the bishop writes, still confounded after all these years by her passionate attachment, “she loved to have me with her.” She follows him to the dock when he is about to leave Africa for Rome, weeping and wailing, begging him either to stay or to take her with him. Finally, desperate to be rid of her, he lies about the time of his departure and makes his escape.

A good try, but Monica, of course, gets her way, on Earth and in heaven. She follows Augustine to Rome and then to Milan when he secures a plum teaching position there. She prays him into the church with more than pious wishes: she has a mother’s spooky clairvoyance and assures him she knows he will find his way to baptism. Her prophecy climaxes in Book IX during their mutual mystical experience in Ostia.

No incident is too small for Augustine in “The Confessions,” provided it has metaphoric value. He is a gifted writer, after all, a pro, and he knows very well that his description of his boyhood theft of pears from a garden--a purely willful act because he didn’t even want to eat the pears--rings a change on the first sin in another garden.

He reports his first prayer--”not to be beaten at school”--and reminds God that in response to his first intercession, “You did not hear my prayer. . . .” Augustine recalls the harshness of his school days and the cruelty of his teachers with the scorekeeping precision of a true memoirist, apparently immune to the irritating exhortation to forgive and forget.

We can see him grow into a young intellectual, sharpening his knives of argument, engaged in his first philosophical battles. The Manichees, a Gnostic sect whose dualism greatly appeals to him at first, later become a grave disappointment. He hopscotches from Manichaeism to a fashionable skepticism, then into a mystical Neoplatonism that leads him finally to the threshold of the Church. He enumerates his hesitations about Catholicism and presents the process, both intellectual and spiritual, that leads him finally to the baptistery in Milan. We feel the circumspection of his mind: After listening carefully to the great Bishop Ambrose, he says coolly, “I realized that the Catholic faith . . . was in fact intellectually respectable.” This is not the response of a credulous seeker but the balanced judgment of an educated, upwardly mobile provincial intent on climbing in Roman society, a classical Latin scholar still slightly uneasy with the folk elements in biblical texts. The urgency of his search for truth never leaves his story. It is the ground beat of the tale.

But we would not read “The Confessions” down through the centuries if it were the testimony of an intellectual’s struggles, no matter how passionately told. It is passion itself that makes Augustine alive to us. He insists that we understand this about him: Well after his intellectual questions had been answered, he continued to resist conversion because, to him, baptism meant chastity. In fact, the most famous line in “The Confessions” is the prayer of his hot adolescence: “Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.”

Augustine was not the promiscuous lover of popular imagination--or of his own description. From the age of 19 he lived in complete and apparently happy fidelity with his girlfriend, a woman of lower rank with whom marriage was not a possibility. We never learn her name. She has a child with Augustine, a son named Adeodatus (Gift of God), and she and the child, with Monica and several youthful friends, compose his intimate circle.

When Augustine does abandon this lover of his youth, it is to make a prudent marriage, a logical career move. The break is shattering. His girlfriend, he says, “was ripped from my side. . . . So deeply was she engrafted into my heart that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood.” While he waited two years for the girl to whom he was engaged to reach marriageable age, he says with the crudeness of a broken heart that he “got myself another woman.” But even this indulgence does not help: “The wound inflicted on me by the earlier separation did not heal. . . . After the fever and the immediate acute pain had dulled, it putrefied, and the pain became a cold despair.”

Is it possible to read “The Confessions” today with the same urgency that Augustine brought to writing it? This is not simply a modern’s self-admiring question about a late fourth century book’s “relevance” to our own secular age. It is a question Augustine would have appreciated, believing as he did in sorting things out for oneself: He refused, for example, to accept the glossy reputation of Faustus, the Manichee sage who proved, when frankly questioned, to be a charming phony. The blunt question of Augustine’s appeal to the modern reader must be posed.

The answer lies in Augustine’s literary self. With all the theological and cultural differences and all the history that divides us from Augustine’s first readers, our recognition of the originality and power of “The Confessions” resides fundamentally in the same place--in his voice. Not because his is a magically “modern” voice from antiquity, somehow chumming up to the reader. In any case, the book isn’t written to us.

It is addressed expressly to God. Magnus es, Domine, it begins: Great are you, Lord. Augustine claims in the first breath of “The Confessions” that his intention is the innate one -- “we humans,” he says simply, “. . . long to praise you.” But the real voice of the book is one of inquiry. He wants to know. At times it is heartbreaking, even comic, to see Augustine struggle with the mystery of existence. “Was there nothing before . . . except the life I lived in my mother’s womb?” he asks in Book I. “But then, my God, my sweetness, what came before that? Was I somewhere else? Was I even someone? I have nobody to tell me. . . . Are you laughing at me for asking you these questions. . . ?” Augustine is willing to look foolish, even before God, if it will get him below the surface of things. This willingness to risk being a fool for the truth, which is all that literary courage is, keeps Augustine young for the ages.

Augustine’s longing to know is not merely intellectual. He must know as one knows through love--by being known. Deus, noverim te, noverim me, he prays. God, let me know You and know myself. Probably no one since Job has inquired of his God as desperately and commandingly. Like Job, Augustine sees prayer as a form of thinking, a way of seeking truth, not a pious form of wishing. But Job is a character in a great primeval tale. Augustine, in the fine paradox of autobiography, is a character in a story and the narrator of that character. He bears in his voice the blood-beat of time. He belongs not to myth but to history. As we do.

But why the final four books? Why ruin the narrative symmetry of his life story by attaching a long, speculative essay on memory (Book X), chapters on time and eternity and a final intense reading of the opening lines of Genesis (Books XI, XII, and XIII)? Perhaps the speculation on memory makes sense in an autobiography, which is rooted in personal recollection. But after writing the sublime scene in Ostia with Monica and recounting her final hours and his grief in Book IX, Augustine moves smoothly, without explanation or apology, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, through the long chapter on memory into an extended allegorical meditation on the opening lines of the creation story of Genesis as if this, too, were his life.

In fact, the movement from his life to his reading of Genesis is not smooth--it is ablaze. The writing becomes more, not less, urgent. His story, for Augustine, is apparently only part of the story. There is a certain logic at work. Having constructed himself in the first nine books, Augustine rushes on to investigate how God created the universe--how God, that is, created him. And all of us, all of this. Reading Genesis with his laser-beam gaze is a form of concentrated life. Reading, pondering, is experience. For Augustine lectio is not “reading” as we might think of it. For him, as for his teacher Ambrose, it is an acute form of listening. It is an act filled with the pathos of the West: The individual, alone in a room, puts finger to page and follows the Word, attempting to touch the elusive Lord, the mystical That Which Is, the Word, last seen scurrying down the rabbit hole of creation: In the beginning God created. . . .

The voice of God is speaking on that page. Augustine, grappling with Genesis in his study, is no less heated--more so, really--than Augustine struggling famously with “the flesh.” He invents autobiography not to reveal his memory of his life but to plumb the memory of God’s creative urge.

“My mind burns to solve this complicated enigma,” he says with an anguish more intense than anything that accompanies his revelations about his own life. He understands his life as a model of the very creation that is beyond him and of course within him. He writes and writes, he reads and reads his way through the double conundrum, the linked mystery of his own biography and of creation.

He makes the central, paradoxical discovery of autobiography: Memory is not in the service of the past; it is the future that commands its presence. Yet how bizarre the truncated modern notion of “seeking a self” would seem to Augustine. Autobiography for him does not seek a self, not even for its own salvation. For Augustine, the memory work of autobiography creates a self as the right instrument to seek meaning. The purpose is praise. If God, the source, the creator, is found, what else is there to do but praise?

Early in “The Confessions,” Augustine poses a problem that has a familiar modern ring: “[I]t would seem clear that no one can call upon You without knowing You.” This is the problem of God’s notorious absence. Augustine takes the next step west: he seeks his faith with his doubt. “May it be,” he asks, “that a man must implore You before he can know You?” His assumption is that faith should not be confused with certainty. The only things to count on are longing and the occult directives of desire. So, Augustine wonders aloud to God, does this mean prayer must come before faith? Perhaps not knowing is the first condition of prayer. Can that be?

Augustine finds his working answer in scripture: “How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? They shall praise the Lord that seek him.” Longing is the only sure knowledge, that core of human instinct which unfurls its song of praise. This is the same center from which the narrative impulse of memory streams. Studying the meaning of creation, Augustine discovers there is no way to escape the instinct to cry out this core truth which proves to be, quite simply, the wonder of a life lived. And, in the spirit of the Word, a life written.